This week, we’ve been continuing the design work on our day-night cycle, especially for time-specific missions/events and how they fit in with one of our major design goals, which is to have the game be as pick-up-and-play as possible.

For example, if the day or night sections of the cycle are too long, then a player who has, say, an hour of free time to play might log in and find that their next mission is a time-specific one, but that the time period it was active has just ended, and won’t come around again until after their available playing time is over, meaning that they’re totally unable to progress their character further through the story for no fault of their own.

One simple solution to this would be to make the day and night periods short enough so that no matter when a player logged in they wouldn’t have to wait very long for either period to begin, but as we’ve mentioned before, a comic book game really needs a substantial nighttime experience/environment to go with its daytime one, and having these last only a short time wouldn’t really allow players who preferred one or the other to really enjoy it for very long before it switched to the opposite one.

For normal characters, I'd say that the best thing to do is provide enough stuff to do that they don't just get stuck on a mission that needs to be at night.

For characters who operate mainly at night, the only solution I can think of is night servers, servers where most of the day cycle is night. Can have three types: day server, night server, day/night balanced server.